Abalone (excerpt)

Under the peeking sunrise, off the shores of La Jolla, California, my great-grandfather Ken Jewel dives for abalone. It’s early in the morning, the sky pearly and pink, and the water is cold. He pries the shells from the slick rock walls and swims with one arm to the formation nearer the shores. He tucks the mollusks into a crevice he’s familiar with, so that later in the day, when his wife starts dinner, he’ll say he’ll go dive for something from the sea, and come back faster than anyone can imagine, weighed down with bristly shells of abalone, still sea-glazed. My grandmother Ginny and her sister Audrey will jump around at his feet, celebrating the heroic catch. Or maybe they will be repelled by the ocean stink, newly transported girls from Queens, New York. It’s impossible to know, now.

“We took the train all the way across the country,” my grandmother— who we all called Gigi — would tell me again, and again, sometimes every couple of hours, at family parties. Alzheimers was smoothing the grooves of her brain. It was slowly erasing the already thin link I felt between us. “We took the train when I was just a little girl, about six years old,” she would say before we sat down to eat dinner. “It took a week to get from New York to California,” she would tell me after dessert.

When I heard the story about her father diving for abalone, it was after Gigi had already passed away. I savored this new story, even while questioning its authenticity. I didn’t know Gigi as well as I would have liked. The details are not important and only partially because of the near-decade long memory recession, but I regret not having a stronger relationship with her. When a family member (an aunt or uncle, I can’t remember who) told the abalone story, I was invited into her memory.

I wonder if La Jolla was a predetermined destination for my family. Some scholars say “la jolla” derives from the Spanish word “la joya,” meaning “the jewel,” while others posit that “la jolla” is a phonetic translation of the Kumeyaay tribe’s name for the area, “Land of Holes.” Still, if you aren’t impervious to the poetry of synchronization, you could argue that Ginny Jewel was destined for this Pacific town. Gigi loved La Jolla, and she loved the sea. At seventeen, she met my grandfather on the beach. She boogie-boarded until her Alzheimers reigned her in from the surf. Even the eventual retirement community my grandparents settled into is perched right above the water. I’d seen Gigi in a bathing suit as often as I’d seen her in clothes, painting water color landscapes or rallying us for a raft ride down a Yosemite river.

Although I grew up near the ocean in Los Angeles, sea food was not something my father dove for, and I didn’t develop a taste for it until much later. I first heard of abalone in the fourth grade when as a class we read Island of the Blue Dolphins. The book is a fictionalized account of “the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island,” a member of the Nicoleña tribe who, in 1835, was left on that particular Channel Island after Alaskan otter hunters massacred a portion of her people and missionaries moved the surviving members to the California shore some seventy miles away. A storm prevented the Lone Woman from making it on board. When a fur trapper finally found her, she had survived on the island for eighteen years, alone, in a hut made of whale bones.

My understanding of the historical story weaves together with the fictionalized version. In the book, the Lone Woman is a young girl named Karana. Originally departing the island with her tribe, Karana jumps ship to save her brother, who has accidentally been left behind, but the ship leaves without either of them. Not long after, a pack of wild dogs kills her brother before her eyes, but the detail I remember the most is of Karana gathering abalone during low tide. She crafts hooks out of the pearlescent shell and eats the insides of the mollusk. As a kid unaccustomed to oysters or lobster, I was repelled and fascinated by a life lived off of sea creatures. I imagined salty slimy meat slurped from the shells and gulped down, the sea lapping at Karana’s feet as she collected her food supply. Abalone, it’s worth noting, have for centuries been used to craft tools and adorn alters. In Apache coming-of-age ceremonies, they symbolize the transition from girlhood to womanhood. They’ve been smudge bowls, currency, jewelry. And the ceremonial use of their mother-of-pearl shells is said to expand consciousness.

Island of the Blue Dolphins is a story of survival, but it’s also a story of aloneness….

(excerpted from “Abalone,” in Catamaran Vol. 9 Issue 10